As Elon Musk presented the new Tesla 3, a fawning press announced that the “world-changing car” could “dominate” the market. Within days, 276,000 people had put down $1,000 to pre-order the car.

But the Model 3 doesn’t exist yet. There is no final production version, much less any production. Musk is “fairly confident” that deliveries could start by the end of 2017. But running on schedule isn’t Tesla’s strong suit. Meanwhile, Tesla’s current best-seller has been plagued by quality problems.

Related news

News that the Trump administration is poised to ask Congress for deep budget cuts to the Energy Department's renewable energy and energy efficiency programs has thus far generated less outrage than the White House’s abandonment of the Paris Climate Treaty, yet has the potential to be far more damaging to efforts to respond to climate change. According to documents obtained by the Washington Post, the White House is seeking to slash the budgets by 72% in fiscal year 2019, which would cut research in fuel efficient vehicles by 82%, bioenergy technologies by 82%, advanced manufacturing by 75%,...

Antipoverty group Oxfam International got a lot of attention for claiming this week that there’s a global “inequality crisis,” but a far more important point is entirely neglected: globally, income distribution is less unequal than it has been for 100 years. The best data on this comes from Professor Branko Milanovic, formerly of the World Bank, now at City University of New York. His research shows that, mostly because of Asia’s incredible growth, global inequality has declined sharply for several decades, reducing so much that the world hasn’t been this equal for more than a century...

Climate expert Bjorn Lomborg has called the UN out for this, pointing out the consequences of fighting global hunger with climate policy. “Hunger is a big problem, and for a long time, we have solved it. Mr Lomborg tells Chris Smith climate change policy and labelling world hunger as a result of climate change is the most costly and least effective way to help.